


Clockwork

by Alecellent



Series: Heat and Clockwork [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, I ALMOST FORGOT THAT ONE yes it's always very important to me that he's trans, I'm tagging to be safe, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kinda, M/M, Rated T for language, Sadstuck, Trans Dave Strider, i manifest a dave tulpa so that post canon dave can have catharsis, it's a minor minor reference- just flavor text but to be safe, not really but, or whatever you would could the green sun mission as, this can be read seperate from the first part cause the two are unrelated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26616211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alecellent/pseuds/Alecellent
Summary: When you’re twelve, you have a recurring dream. You’re standing on the Galveston shores, watching a storm roll in from beyond the coast. The storm looms heavy over your head, and you drown.Dave looks back on his life- 15, 14, 13, 12- and reckons with the legacy of a childhood in the shadow of a god.
Relationships: Dave Strider & Dirk Strider, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider
Series: Heat and Clockwork [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1886914
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	Clockwork

**Author's Note:**

> i love you more than the world can contain  
> in its lonely and ramshackle head  
> there’s only a shadow of me; in a matter of speaking, I'm dead
> 
> john my beloved - sufjan stevens

It’s an overcast day, when your Bro asks you if you love him. 

“Of course,” you say “Who else would I love?”. Bro is cool and strong and everything you want to be. Sometimes when you’re alone in your room (as alone as you can be, with the cameras hidden among your belongings), you pitch your voice down and gel your hair up. You don’t look like him in the mirror, but you don’t look like you either, and it makes your head feel fuzzy and light, like you’re drifting out of your body. It’s the same feeling you get when he looks at you after a bad night of DJ-ing, fucked up on amphetamines and laced weed- like he sees you, but he’s not really seeing you- like you’re something glossy and slick slipping between the gears of reality. It’s hollow and cold like the needlepoint eye of a storm. You have no doubt that he sees you now, though. Bro looks down at you with those impenetrable shades, and you feel pinned to the ground, pinned to your bones, a butterfly in a looking glass. Atlas beneath the world, Helios charioting the sun. Bro raises his sword again, and gestures towards you to do the same; whatever moment had just occurred has passed. You raise your sword and prepare to die.

Later, hands tacky with your own blood, you click on a link that reads “Is God like my Father?”

It’s a paper written by someone describing child abuse. It says “in situations of abuse, understanding is buried and forgotten”. You close the tab, and sleep fitfully that night, something sticky and foul turning to rot in the pit of your stomach.

* * *

_When you’re twelve, you have a recurring dream. You’re standing on the Galveston shores, feet buried in the sands. The brackish water laps at your legs, murky grey with silt and filth, too cloudy to see the bottom. Above you, the sky looms dark and heavy. Wisps of storm curl, thick with rain water and guilt; the humidity is choking you alive, warm and heady like smoke in your lungs, but you don’t move, don’t scream, don’t feel anything even as the clouds part with a cacophonous boom, and rain splits the heavens. The water rises and rises until it laps over your head and you hold your breath but it rushes into your mouth anyways. It tastes like brine and cold and sorrow._

__

__

_You’re in your room now. The small window overlooking the streets below now shows you water, briney blue and deep as night, the aftermath of Noah’s flood that you don’t seem to remember surviving. The sky is clear, marred only with wisps of clouds and seagulls, cutting through the day like a butterknife, like a sword, and you think it’s the loneliest thing you’ve ever seen. You don’t recognize the clothes or the blueprints or your hands, but you climb out the window to sit on your fire escape, and think to yourself, “so this is the weight of legacy”._

* * *

When you first get to the Land of Heat and Clockwork, you ask Terezi to leave you alone. You don’t know what she smells in your words, but it’s enough for her to back off for two full days. You spend those days curled up on the floor- the gears are smooth wrought iron, but the lava has heated them into something brittle and hot. The sky is dark, darker than you have words to describe, but the ground is hot like tarmac would be in Houston after a long day of sun, and it warms you to your bones.

The next time you see a sky that black is hundreds of thousands of lightyears away home. Rose holds a crystal ball in her hands, her casual grip too hard to be anything but fake. “I know what you did your first days on LOHAC.” she says. “I’m sorry about what your brother has done.” You nod. Privately, you think that Rose isn’t as eloquent as she is over text. Her voice shakes, and she has the faintest touch of a lisp at the edges of her words, years of speech therapy reducing it to a ghost, faintly trailing after her ‘s’s. You wonder what your own voice betrays. Thirteen years of mimicry, irony that was taught not birthed, the slight pitching of a boy that spent ten years a girl. You know what Rose thinks LOHAC has done to you, iron wrought like asphalt, lava like the sun. You know she thinks it was fear. But she’s wrong. Thirteen is too young to understand, even as an amataur therapist. It’s also too young to explain- days spent soaking in heat from your bones, watching the soles of your shoes turn tacky under your feet, frozen in a longing for Houston so deep it fit in the hollows of your birdlike bones- and all of it, reduced to the childish fantasies of a boy not yet fourteen.

_We’re only children_. You think with a start. Thirteen years old, and sacrificing everything for gods that hate you, that pitch, dark in the sky like shadows of a brother in the corner of your eye. Playing casual in the face of death, too afraid to die alone and too selfish to ask for help. Thirteen years old, and a sacrifice like suicide. _We’re only children, and today is the end of the world_.

The bomb ticks down to one, and your hand closes on Rose’s. You watch glass splinter with spiderweb fractures, watch red and blue turn into a bright, nitric green.

Molten tarmac, you think as it explodes. The sky looks like tar.

* * *

It’s a pitch black hurtle through space, when Karkat asks you if you love him. 

“Of course”, you say. You’re lying on your mattress, legs tangled with his, watching the credits of Good Luck Chuck. It’s a long journey through space, even with all the movie nights, and three years is a long time to hate. 

Karkat looks over at you like he doesn’t quite believe you, and you shift over to face him. “Seriously bro, we’ve been dating for how long? Almost six months? Course I care about you.”  
“But caring about me isn’t the same as loving me.” he says.  
“No but…” 

Your voice dries up in your throat. You don’t want to tell him that Bro is the only person you think you’ll ever really be able to love. Not in the same way you love Karkat (you recognize that that’s uniquely romantic) but in a way that’s more meaningful, or maybe just more defining- more lasting in its aftermath. Because you love Karkat in sweet kisses and soft repentance at night, and you love Bro like bloody knuckles and steel as a prayer. Karkat’s hand molds you, but Bro’s formed you, broke you, made dust of your bones. If Karkat is your framework, Bro is the automation underneath, the whirling, churning gears that bring your feet into the stance of a clockwork knight, and you want to explain this to him, but you think he knows better than anyone that blood forms bonds like iron.

“It’s different.” You say. He doesn’t ask you for an explanation.

* * *

_When you climb back into your room, your first move is to find your Bro. You look in the easy places first- the living room, the kitchen, the roof. After that, you tear through the rest of the house- his room, both bathrooms, the small alcove he thinks you don’t know about where he sets up the cameras and splices together all of your videos. Room after room after room until you’re panting breathless, mocked by the light of the Texas sun._

__

__

_You don’t bother for a moment to think about the fact that he might be dead, that he might have abandoned you for good, that today may have been the day he finally decided you were a burden too painful to bear._

_You search, and search, and you never once think about the presence of ghosts._

__

__

_Even now, it doesn’t once cross your mind that he’s truly gone._

* * *

“Y’know, I was the first to find him.” Dirk tenses in your arms. You’re both sitting on a ledge, facing into a horizon that’s green like suicide, and you try not to think about bombs and suns and a sky like melting tar. “Find… him.” He says slowly.

“Bro” you elaborate “the other you. I was the first one to find his body.”

“Jesus” Dirk winces. “Was I..?” he makes a choking sound, and draws a line over his neck.

“Naw. Stabbed. Pinned to the ground, actually. I think Jack killed him with his own sword.” You lean your head onto his shoulder. “He looked kinda like a butterfly, actually, all limp like that.”

“God,” Dirk hisses. “That’s fucked up.”

You pause. You don’t think you’ve ever thought of it like that. Does that make you a bad brother? It’s not that it didn’t hurt. But it didn’t fuck you up either. It didn’t haunt you. Bro was dead, and that was it. Just a statement. You didn’t mourn for him, and you didn’t feel happy; because somewhere in the back of your head, you think he’s still alive. 

Sat here next to Dirk, you realize for a moment, that he’s not as tall as you imagined. Bro always seemed to tower over you, a giant in stature and personality, but Dirk is a good head shorter than you; you’re slouching just to hug him. That’s something about time, you suppose. It’s gears twist and weave under your feet, and sometimes you forget it’s not the only thing running ever forward. Child, teen, adult, dead. Child, Dirk, Bro, dead. You think about Bro, alive now, as a kid thrust upon a world with only a puppet as a guardian- soft hands, baby cheeked, and a desperate, aching desire to survive. You think of yourself in your room, voice pitched down, hair gelled up, searching for something to describe love that tastes like fear. You think about being pinned to the ground like a butterfly in a looking glass.

“Yeah. It is.”

Later when you cut through Dirk’s neck, a gull’s wing through sky, you try very, very hard not to think about that last dead.

* * *

_When you sleep, you don’t have that dream anymore. Bro is dead, Bro is bleeding red onto the ground, Bro is abandoned in a game that no longer exists, in a world that’s been scattered like dust._

__

__

_Bro is alive, and he speaks in your ear like a god._

* * *

It’s a dry and clear sundown when the Bro in your head asks if you love him.

You suppose it’s not Bro. It couldn’t be Bro, since it’s been years since Bro (at least the Bro you know) had died, pinned to the ground like a crushed butterfly. It’s been years beyond that since you were a kid, dressed up as him in your bathroom like an idol you could never be, like a god made of ghosts. You’ve been on T long enough to not need to lower your voice anymore, and you don’t have the same brand of hair gel on Earth C, but sometimes when you look in the mirror, you still see that Not-Bro, the one that looks like a kid trying to be brave for an audience that he will never see.

You want to feel bitter, or to mourn, or to feel anything beyond the crushing looming weight of guilt like smoke, like rain, that has made a home somewhere in your heart. You hate Bro- hate that he has ruined you in every way he knew how, hate that though you’ll give Karkat kisses, you still can’t say you love him. You miss Bro- miss him for dying for you, miss him for trying to save you, miss him because you know what it’s like to be a child facing a sacrifice like suicide, facing the sun, and feeling so completely that you do not want to die alone.

The Bro in your head asks again, if you love him.

“Dunno.” you say, “I ain't sure I know how to love you. Cause you needed me to love you like a martyr, but I never wanted a damn martyr- I wanted you. Cause you raised me to love you blindly, like clockwork, and I can only love you like a thirteen year old kid, asking the world what the fuck it means to be the brother of a god, how to mourn someone he doesn’t know. I think I love you, but what kinda love tastes like fear? You asked so much bullshit of me, and then you up and _died_ , well what the fuck am I s'pposed to do with it now? _What do I do with your bones?_ ”

You end your speech, breathless. Bro has gone silent.

You think, in the absence, that you suppose it’s not Bro. Bro doesn't need repentance. Doesn’t need absolving. He died years ago, in a game that no longer exists, in a world that’s been scattered like dust. But you’re still alive. Child, teen, adult, dead. Child, teen, adult, dead. You don’t think you were ever really a kid. You don't think it was ever him asking you for your love.

The Bro in your head is talking again. He speaks a voice that sounds like a pitched down impression, like gelled up hair and guilt, like a storm, the weight of legacy, iron wrought gears, red pretending to be orange, and suicide. He speaks like a child.

You think about tacky hands, a green like suicide, seagulls- and then after- surviving, celebrating Rose’s marriage, game nights with Dirk, and Karkat kissing the top of your head.

You think about childhood.

It’s a dry and clear sundown, when Not-Bro asks you if you love him.

“Of course.” you say. “Who else would I love?”

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of notes:  
> one: the referenced paper, "Is God like my Father?" is a real paper, written by two sisters about their abuse, and the line i referenced from it is a real line. it's title is partially what inspired this fic, but also, i just love dave and want him to practice self love and get some damn catharsis.
> 
> two: the other thing that inspired this fic is that houston got another damn hurricane yesterday, and my school flooded so i got the day off. listening to 'john my beloved' by sufjan stevens vibes when it's stormy out, i highly recommend it
> 
> three: any comments/kudos/interaction is highly highly appreciated, that shit means the world to me, genuinely. thank you so much for reading, and i hope you enjoyed !!!


End file.
